Sexual violence can take many forms. It violates the most basic of human rights, and its effects resonate long after the act. It also perpetuates the vulnerability of women and girls to HIV infection.
In the developing world 2 out of 3 young people living with HIV are female.
In some countries in Africa young women are five times more likely to be infected than young men.
In September of 1995 the United Nations convened the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. The official name of the Conference was “The Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace”. 189 governments participated in the conference and more than 5,000 representatives from 2,100 non-governmental organizations.
The outcome document of this conference known as The Platform for Action set out a number of actions that were to lead to fundamental changes in the lives of women and girls. Section L of the document focuses on the girl child and contains nine strategic objectives with corresponding actions that were to be taken by governments and civil society.
The objectives are:
In 2010 the United Nations will review progress on Beijing. An important part of this Beijing +15 review will be to ask how and in what ways girls are better off or worse off than they were in 1995.
As an NGO representative at the UN working on girls’ issues I am interested in what you think, especially if you are a girl.
Can you cite one success and one failure regarding any or all of these objectives? Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas.
Read more at: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/girl.htm
Pakistani women, reacting to the public flogging of a seventeen year old girl in the Swat valley protested in Lahore, on April 4.
On April 6, Pakistan’s top judge ordered a court hearing into the public flogging of the girl, filmed on an a cell phone. See: FRONTLINE: Where women are flogged… | PBS
The recently restored chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, summoned senior government officials before a special eight-judge bench in response to public outrage over the video, which shows a bearded militant whipping the screaming girl 34 times.
Chaand Bibi the girl at the center of the controversy did not appear in court, although ordered to do so and has denied being the burqa clad figure in the video. The Taliban control the area where she lives and claim that it is their right to thrash women, so her denial is understandable.
Meanwhile, the man who filmed the Taliban flogging has said that the treatment meted out to the girl was actually a “punishment” for her refusing a marriage proposal from a militant. This is consistant with reports coming out of Swat that the Taliban have ordered families to declare in the mosques if they have unmarried daughters so that they can be married off to militants. Families who do not comply have been threatened with “dire consequences.”
In November, in a post entitled, Saving Girls in New York from the Life, I wrote about domestically trafficked and commercially exploited girls in New York City. Since then, the United States Justice Department has released some shocking new statistics revealing the extent of human trafficking in this country. These statistics show that the typical slave in the United States today is an American girl, a female American citizen under the age of 17.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), and its reauthorizations in 2003, 2005, and 2008 define a human trafficking victim as a person induced to perform labor or a commercial sex act through force, fraud, or coercion. Any person under age 18 who performs a commercial sex act is considered a victim of human trafficking, regardless of whether force, fraud, or coercion was present.
View the whole report from the Justice Department at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cshti08.htm
To find out what you can do to combat modern day slavery in the United States visit: http://www.stophumantraffickingny.org/faq/
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